Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Garlic Fried Rice with Ganbei (scallops)

I'm back from a fantastic week-long trip to Taiwan, visiting family, eating, site-seeing, and more eating. For better or worse, it's reinvigorated my disappointment with the DC food and grocery scene...alas.

But on to the garlic fried rice with ganbei (Chinese dried scallops): genius! This was the first dinner I cooked for myself after returning to the States, and the flavors were just excellent. My summer roommate had some leftover rice he was going to throw out unless I was going to use it, so of course my first thought was of fried rice. I really liked the garlic fried rice I had at Aloha Ramen in Seattle when I was visiting over the winter and had been meaning to try making some myself.

Now, sinangag, which is Filipino garlic fried rice, uses crushed/minced garlic and is just garlic and rice, at its basic conception. I like the crisp texture of fried garlic slices, though, and definitely wanted to include them (I think Aloha did this, too, but can't quite remember). Basically, I included an extra step at the beginning, of frying the garlic and then setting it aside while continuing on with fried rice before adding the garlic chips back on top at the end.

Tip: For frying garlic slices, be sure to cut them pretty thin, so that they crisp up without developing a chewy interior, and of uniform thickness, so that they fry at the same rate. Pull out slices as they finish so that none overcook and turn bitter. I made this mistake and waited too long on some--the darker brown ones.

To go with the dried scallop flavor of the ganbei (aka conpoy in Cantonese), I used fish sauce instead of my usual soy sauce for fried rice, though I'm sure either would be fine. See below for my recipe:

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Thanks for stopping by! This blog is a journal of my explorations in dairy-, (mostly) gluten-, peanut-, tree nut-, coconut-, and various seeds-free cooking. Join me as I experiment with and improve dishes, nerd out about technique, and just try to put delicious food on the table out of an ordinary kitchen.

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